Quotes

A technical talk without proofs is like love without sex. - Luca
Trevisan

I don't mind the forces of evil/if it gets me closer to you
- Electric Six

This area is very confused. And I'm not helping. - Eric Brewer on
process scheduling.

Every problem can be solved with a supercompiler. - Eric Brewer

I don't know if this hypothesis scares me or if I need it - Jacques
Derrida, in _The Post Card_

One inoculates the public with a
contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the
inhumanity of the Established Order and its values, according to this way
of thinking, is an illness which is common, natural, forgivable; one must
not collide with it head-on, but rather exorcise it like a possession: the
patient is made to give a representation of his illness, he is made
familiar with the very appearance of his revolt, and this revolt
disappears all the more surely since, once at a distance and the object of
a gaze, the Established Order is no longer anything but a Manichaean
compound and therefore inevitable, one which wins on both counts, and is
therefore beneficial. The immanent evil of enslavement is redeemed by the
transcendent good of religion, fatherland, the Church, etc. A little
"“confessed" ”evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.
Roland Barthes,
Operation Margarine.

Life is not about having fun. Life is about accomplishment. - Michael
O. Rabin (in class; later said it wasn't supposed to be taken that
seriously)

PUPIL DELTA: You should now call it a theorem. There is
nothing conjectural about it any more.
PUPIL ALPHA: I wonder. I see that this experiment can be performed for a
cube or for a tetrahedron, but how am I to know that it can be performed
for any polyhedron? For instance, are you sure, Sir, that any
polyhedron, after having a face removed, can be stretched flat on the
blackboard? I am dubious about your first step.
- Imre Lakatos, _Proofs and Refutations_

A: If I'd invented linear programming and the simplex method, I'd
say my life would have been worth it.
B: The simplex method...that's not even
polynomial time... - Two theorists.

These extra probes are not free (in the technical sense of the word)
and hence do not cost us anything. - Johan Hastad, "Clique is hard to
approximate within n to the power 1 - epsilon."

You and me in the waiting room of a disused railroad station,
scavenging for a few antiques, we'll make a fortune just have patience. If
we find an old signal box you can write your dissertation.
- The Magnetic Fields

FIRE CHIEF: I am going to reconcile you. You both are partly right.
When the doorbell rings, sometimes there is someone, other times there is
no one. Eugene Ionesco, _The Bald Soprano_

Admittedly, inherent difficulties with storage and retrieval make a
black hole horizon less than ideal as a hard disk. Scott Aaronson and
Andris Ambainis, "Quantum Search of Spatial Regions"

This man is strange, even to himself. Don DeLillo, Libra

I am what I am/and I am impossibly glam/and I am happy as a
clam/cause I'm a vampire. "Cause I'm A Vampire," Future Bible Heroes.

Ideally then, you should pick a password that you and your coauthors
can remember, but which cannot be guessed by anyone else; we recommend
spelling your last name backwards. SIGACT submission server.

P.S. If you believed that, oh boy do I have a bridge to sell!
README from sample code in CS261, Fall 2004.

This is too hard to prove, so let's prove something more general.
Michael Ben-Or.